4 - 7th November 2018

Leo and Daniel both gave talks at the ProbGen Conference in CSHL on “Reconstructing the genealogies of humans and wild mice” and “Decomposition of mouse spermatogenesis at single-cell resolution reveals dynamic transcriptional programs orchestrated by a rich regulatory repertoire”.

12th September 2018

22nd August 2018

Postdoc opportunity in statistical and population genetics at University of Oxford.
Closing date: 17th September 2018

We are currently advertising for a postdoctoral researcher in Statistical and Population Genetics at the University of Oxford’s Department of Statistics. Supervisory support will be jointly provided by Simon Myers and Jonathan Marchini (Oxford) and Dr Garrett Hellenthal (UCL). The post is for 18 months.
For informal queries contact Simon Myers (myers@stats.ox.ac.uk). Full details at http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/vacancies/.

12th March 2018

6th February 2018

Clare and Simon have been working with Oxford Sparks to create an animation about their work on fine scale population structure as part of a special exhibition at the University of Oxford Museum of Natural History. You can watch the animation at youtube.com/watch?v=G6bNXdwEA84 and find out more about the Settlers exhbition at oum.ox.ac.uk/settlers/.

29th January 2018

Wellcome to Chris Cole who is joining the group for a rotation project as part of the Genomic Medicine and Statistics DPhil course.

3 Jan 2018

A number of our group are going to the 51st Population Genetics Group Meeting this week in Bristol. Leo will be giving a presentation on “A method for estimating genome-wide genealogies for thousands of samples”, and Jeffery will be presenting his previous post-doc work: “A numerical solution of the Wright-Fisher SDE with application to transition probability density approximation”.

15 December 2017

We went out for lunch this week to mark the departure of Ran who is off to do a second postdoc in the Ratcliffe group, Oxford.

06 December 2017

Simon delivered the Francis Crick lecture at the Royal Society on “The birth of a new species: Bringing together, yet driving apart”. (more details). If you missed it you can watch it on the Royal Societies YouTube channel here!

27 August 2017

31 May 2017

Nick’s paper “Human PRDM9 Can Bind And Activate Promoters, And Other Zinc-Finger Proteins Associate With Reduced Recombination In cis” is now available on bioRxiv!

18 July 2016.

Breaking news is that Simon has been awarded the 2017 Francis Crick Medal and Lecture by the Royal Society “for transforming our understanding of meiotic recombination and of human population history. ” The prize lecture will be delivered in December 2017.

This prestigious prize is a great recognition of the contribution that Simon is making to understanding key aspects of genetics.

04 July 2016.

Robbie and Simon (along with coauthors) have published a Nature Genetics paper detailing the STITCH method for Rapid genotype imputation from sequence without reference panels. This method allows for imputation based only on sequencing read data, without requiring additional reference panels or array data. The approach is accurate even in settings of extremely low sequencing coverage. For example, accurate imputation of 5.7 million SNPs at a mean r2 value of 0.98 in 2,073 outbred laboratory mice is achieved (0.15× sequencing coverage). In a related paper, also in Nature Genetics today, STITCH is used to do Genome-wide association of multiple complex traits in outbred mice.

23 February 2016.

Organisers: Jonathan Marchini, University of Oxford, UK; Simon Myers, University of Oxford, UK; Jotun Hein, University of Oxford, UK; Peter Ralph, University of South California, USA

11 February 2016.

A study by a team including 5 members of the Myers Group has published a paper in Nature that shows the role the PRDM9 gene plays in speciation. This was achieved by completely restoring fertility in normally infertile hybrids of two mouse subspecies, by the insertion of a human equivalent of the PRDM9 gene.

16 November 2015.

Robbie is writing up his DPhil thesis and has found employment! He will be working with Genomics plc in Oxford as a Statistical Bioinformatician / Geneticist.

15 July 2015.

We had burgers and a few beers to mark the departure of Nick this week. Nick is off to do a second PhD in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley.

March 2015.

The People of the British Isles paper appeared in Nature. This paper leverages some of the recent work done by the Myers group and “shows that subtle variations in the genetic make-up of modern Britons reflect the history of their islands’ colonisation by peoples from mainland Europe since the last Ice Age.” (credit: Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics)

February 2014.

“A genetic atlas of human admixture history” appeared in Science. In this study, which attracted considerable press attention, we developed and applied to a large dataset of 1500 individuals from 94 populations, a model-based approach to identify, and date, mixing events among human populations. The work is the first to describe, in detail, how the DNA of most humans is affected by such events, and discovers impacts on our DNA of recorded historical events, e.g. the Mongol empire.